To the death, Entropy!

I have a small obsession with fighting the inevitable forces of man-made entropy. And I’m not just talking in terms of keeping my own house organized. While I do like to keep a general level of order in that realm, I wouldn’t even say that I’m all that compulsive with messes on a day-to-day basis (maybe because I know they I CAN and WILL clean then up eventually, when I’m good and ready). I’m more talking on a global scale. At work, I have ACTUAL, REAL LIFE daydreams about all the rubber band, ink pen, and paperclip production of the world grinding to a sudden halt and forcing all of us to use up the existing office supplies that have gotten lost in the drawers of our desks and long-forgotten supply-cabinet corners. When I walk through the trash-littered streets of my city (I love you for so many reasons, Philadelphia, but the inability of your citizens to place even a small fraction of their garbage into actual trash cans is not one of them), I dream of the day when I will be able to stop time and pick up every last piece of trash and put it all into the appropriate receptacles, thereby launching an unprecedented era of civic responsibility. (In this waste-free utopia, restaurants will also stop stuffing fistfuls of fliers into my door and Chase will stop sending me 5 credit card offers per day.)

So you can only imagine what holidays like Christmas do to my order-seeking sensibilities. The wanton consumerism! The massive amounts of non-recyclable packaging! The influx of pounds upon pounds of additional, mostly unnecessary items into our homes and the world! I realize this makes me sound like a complete scrooge (and certainly like someone who hates America and never wants to see our economy recover), but in many ways, mostly related to a childhood where my mother and a kitchen cross stitching routinely chided us with the old shame and guilt-inducing mid-western phrase, “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without”, I am one! It’s in my nature to cringe at the new, the expensive, the unnecessary. That’s not to say I don’t partake in those things from time to time, and that I don’t find a way to enjoy it when I do, but it is to say that you can far more frequently find me lamenting my lack of new/decent clothing than actually doing anything to remedy the situation–since for me that process brings with it a different but equal dose of emotional distress.

So what’s a momma to do, now that she’s brought forth into the world an adorable but wholly entropic mini-monster? A mini-monster who just had her first Christmas and is approaching her first birthday and everyone who knows her and loves her wants to shower her with gifts and gifts and GIFTS!

I struggle with this. I feel like it was one thing to put my foot down for my own shower and say, “Only used things, please!” But it feels much more scroogey of me to tell people that no, you shouldn’t give my rosy-cheeked daughter anything for Christmas or her birthday because she doesn’t need it and it just creates more waste/spending in the world and the money could be better used elsewhere. Because really, people aren’t giving her these things because they think she must have them, they want to give her gifts because they love her and they love us–and in our culture this is largely how we demonstrate that love! And after all, it IS nice to have special things from special friends to remind us of that love on a daily basis.

On the other hand, does a girl who already has “everything” really need more of it just because an annual tradition dictates it? We’ve got a world that is already crammed to overflowing with people and junk that those people can’t even be bothered to dispose of properly, and in the grand scheme of things, my family is taking up far more than our fair share of what’s available to go around–when is enough enough?

So I’m going to go out on a short limb for the upcoming birthday. Of course I’ll tell my family and friends who already bought and are excited about a gift for the little gal that we are THRILLED that they thought of her and love her so and that we will cherish said gift always, but I will encourage anyone else who was toying with the idea of a gift to instead give the money to their favorite Haiti-related organization in honor of the birthday girl. And I’ll continue reiterating that used gifts are always welcome and even especially appreciated. My hope is that slowly we can just turn that into the expectation, the “usual” for our family–Christmas and birthdays are for getting just a few very special new things and a few more just as special old things, but mostly for giving our friends and family the opportunity to show their great love for us by doing some good elsewhere in the world. Right now Haiti is an obvious and much-needed target for that good, but I will work to get more personal/creative with it in the future.